Music is magic. It speaks to both our mind and body, to what we want to be and how we once were, bringing us together and showing us who we are. Music keeps us alive to the strange and uncanny, alert to feelings that can hardly be expressed in words. It is so very important to remain alive to the unusual, and to resist any urge to explain away experiences that exceed what is known.

Here are some of the characters who feature in Roguespeare songs and who will come together in our forthcoming LP, ‘Tell Me My Name’. 

A feast is being held in the old, haunted orchard on the forest outskirts…

Roguespeare is the crow who brings rich gifts of food and found objects to the feast in the haunted orchard. Most guests come to the orchard on the outskirts of the forest from the nearby village, their feet treading paths entangled by a mesh of tree roots, but the ghost is already at the feast.

Roguespeare is the ghost waiting close to the table set with his own special plate and cup. He was once a scientist, a local man, and in the twilight and stolen sunlight of lanterns hung about yew branches above, he is now quite indistinguishable from the smoke of the cooking fire, the smoulder of incense and sage sticks and the powdery wings of moths. Knowing that his future is not what it was, he looks to the high table draped in white linen where sits the king who summoned him.

Like a sleeper awakened from a long immortal dream of nature’s decay and growth, his one eye looking upward, King Roguespeare sees the crow swoop down to perch upon the standing stone at the orchard’s edge. He ponders the strangeness of his realm. He bids the crow, his uncanny fool, to reveal the secrets worn into the stone by years, and smiles into the soft air nested in the clearing with the low hum of many voices. 

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